Beaches Amateur Radio Society

The Beaches Amateur Radio Society (BARS) is an association of amateur radio operators (ham radio) living in and around the beaches of Jacksonville, FL. The beaches include Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, Jacksonville Beach and Ponte Vedra Beach. Anyone with interest in learning about ham radio are welcome to our meetings or events.

Our regular meetings include ham radio oriented discussions and an educational program. We are open to the public. If you would like to learn more about amateur radio and becoming a “Ham” please attend one of our meetings. We meet every month on the 4th Thursday evening of the month. See our monthly meeting location on the right side of this page.

We also have a regular breakfast meeting on the first Saturday of each month. See our monthly breakfast location on the right side of this page.

If you are holding a public event where safety and and communications are important, we can help. Ham radio operators assist in events such as triathlons, bike races, parades, foot races and air shows. Let us know if we can help with your event.

Beaches Amateur Radio Society (BARS) owns and operates one of the amateur radio repeaters at the Beaches of Jacksonville. Our repeater operates on 145.350 Mhz and is open to all amateur radio operators. If you would like to help support our efforts in maintaining repeater coverage at the Beaches, please join BARS!

If you are new to ham radio and would like to borrow some equipment to get started with please join BARS and take advantage of our equipment loaner program.

BARS has been an ARRL (American Radio Relay League) affiliate club since 1962 and maintain our affiliate status by our members becoming and remaining ARRL members. For more club information visit the ARRL BARS Club page.

We announce meetings, gatherings and special events through the following social networking sites.

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Next Meeting​NEW LOCATION

Our next meeting will be 7pm on Thursday, March 28, 2019 at The Foundation Academy room #405.​ 3675 San Pablo Road South.

​Upcoming Presentations

March ProgramButch Shadwell, KV4YQ Title: Decibel CalculationsDescription: Butch will continue and expand upon last month's program about dB calculations of insertion loss and other specs measured in dB.

Breakfast MeetingNEW LOCATION

The next breakfast meeting will be 8:00am on Saturday, April 6, 2019 at Bacon In the Sun Cafe (798 South 3rd Street Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250) All are welcome!

Repeater Info

The BARS VHF repeater is online and available for use. To access KB4ARS VHF go to 145.350 pl 127.3 and if you have standard analog radio, set your tone setting to TONE SQL. The repeater is capable of both analog and C4FM digital (Yaesu System Fusion) that will mode switch depending on who keys up the repeater last.

Our UHF repeaters (444.875) is currently undergoing upgrades and is not fully operational at this time. Once the repeaters is back online we'll send out a member announcement and post an update here on the web site.